Northern lights tonight in North Dakota

North Dakota sits at about 55° magnetic latitude, so the aurora reaches it from roughly Kp 5.5 — a few nights a year, on G2–G3 storms. The card below reads NOAA's oval, tonight's dark hours, the cloud and the Moon for Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit right now.

North Dakota is the flattest, darkest aurora ground east of the Rockies, at 56–57° magnetic latitude along the Canadian line — the same threshold as northern Minnesota, Kp 5, with far less cloud. The Turtle Mountains on the border are the northernmost public land; Theodore Roosevelt's North Unit has a Bortle 2 sky and the badlands rim for a foreground. Devils Lake gives water to the north. What the state lacks is a tourist infrastructure, which is why it appears in few lists and in most of the best photographs from the 2024 storms.